The Risk Of Going To College Only To Drop Out
Without doubt, the possibility that college freshman will be so overwhelmed by the experience that they have to return home is something no parent wants to think about. But it happens.
“The kids who were college freshmen this year, or sophomores, their last couple of years of high school were predominantly online,” Huiskamp Collins says. “And I saw so much anxiety among those kids as they went to college. Now they’re coming home after a semester or two because they can’t handle it. Or worse.”
She points to the publicized suicide deaths of five college student athletes in the last two months—Sarah Shulze in Wisconsin, Katie Meyer in California, Jayden Hill in Michigan, Robert Martin in New York and Lauren Bernett in Virginia—as evidence that across the nation too many students are unable to cope with the ways in which the world changed over the last two years. “They lost almost two years of social development. And there is this hyper-pressure to perform and excel—to get the 4.0, to start the non-profit,” she continues. “They’re not equipped to go off and be by themselves. Emotionally, they’re more like 10th graders.”
And the college reality they’ll be going into is far from back to normal, statistics say, as 32% of their classmates are thinking of leaving. That percentage is surprisingly similar to the 2020 level Gallup found of 33%, which was understandable at the height of lockdowns that had no real end in sight. But two years later, with vaccines aplenty, many students’ need for a break hasn’t budged.
The most common reason given for this (cited by 76% of students) was emotional stress, and another primary reason (cited by 34%) was that they found the coursework too difficult. In the previous poll in 2020, emotional stress was cited only 42% of the time, and difficult coursework was noted just 17% of the time. Something happened between the fall of 2020 and the summer of 2021 to skew mental health issues to an unsustainable level, Gallup found.
“The two issues—academic challenge and mental health—are highly related, as coursework challenges can increase feelings of stress, and stress can make concentrating on schoolwork and studying even more difficult,” Gallup wrote in the poll findings. “The implications are devastating for students, their families and their institutions.”
(If one looks at the trend and thinks American kids are just spoiled and need to find their mislaid bootstraps, a study in London found that one in four Brits between 16 and 25 thinks it’s unlikely they’ll ever fully recover from the emotional impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.)
The mental health problem among students will likely run into another college problem: family finances. There are families who likely chose schools beyond their price range because borrowing was easy, advisors say. But at least some of the financial aid has to be repaid anyway if a student drops out.
How much has to be paid back (and when) can vary, but the easy answer is pretty much all of it, and soon. “Once you’re out of school for six months, the repayment of federal student loans starts, and sometimes of scholarships, too, depending on the institution,” warns Joe Messinger, a CFP who also developed the planning software College Aid Pro.
Portions of federal grants tied to classes that were never completed also might have to be paid back, and possibly other grants and scholarships as well. For private student loans, the repayment schedules can vary, but often they’re either already being paid back or repayment starts six months after the student leaves school.
The sting of repaying loans without a degree to show for them can be a harsh and painful reality, Messinger says. “There’s no value to going to school for a couple of years. You have to finish.” With that in mind, for a certain kind of client with a certain kind of student, Messinger says he recommends tuition insurance.
This covers the nonrefunded costs of attending college, including tuition, fees, room and board, if a student leaves school for a qualified reason, including a mental health condition such as severe depression or anxiety. Some schools include insurance in the cost of attendance; if they don’t, it typically needs to be purchased by the first day of class, and it covers the following semester. Fees can range from 1% to 2% of college costs, and policies are reupped every term.
“This is a risk mitigation,” Messinger says. “For parents who aren’t really sure about how their child is going to do but want to give it a chance, they should really consider insurance. That way if the kid comes home halfway through the second semester, everyone’s protected.”
The Risk In Gapping
As much as a gap year sounds like a reasonable solution, a chance for young adults to make up for social isolation by getting out of their house and out into the world—through a structured volunteer program like AmeriCorps, perhaps—there are some significant financial consequences just ahead.
American families are about to come into a world of hurt in the form of tuition hikes, changes to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form (also known as FAFSA; see sidebar) and the grinding beatdown of a period of high inflation, sources say. Put it all together, and delays to starting that four-year degree will mean higher costs in the future.